Category Archives: race

The Great “Original Sin” Debate

03 Wednesday Oct 2012

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Obama-McCain Third Debate (post-debate picture), Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, October 15, 2008. (Jim Bourg/Reuters).

We’ve finally meandered our way into the presidential debate cycle portion of our Election ’12 cycle. I’m grateful to finally see what the media has built up to be a match between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New York Giants! Not really, of course. But from standpoint of political reporters and pundits alike, tonight’s first debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney might as well be a sports event.

In the end, though, this isn’t as much a presidential debate as it is a personality contest with questions and psychologists’ interpretations of nonverbal communication. It will be more hype than substance, more stiff than an overbaked souffle. One of the men — most likely President Obama — will win this first debate, though it won’t be clear how significant this “win” will be, given the trends for the past couple of months.

Professor Wendy Goldman, Carnegie Mellon University, circa 2012, October 3, 2012. (http://www.history.cmu.edu).

I am reminded of another debate, one that occurred in my Comparative Working-Class Formation graduate seminar at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall of ’93. It was taught by Professor Wendy Goldman, wife of Marcus Rediker, both decidedly Marxist, but in Goldman’s case, Marxist without any considerations of race at all. It was a course that turned into a debate because I’d already grown tired of professors at Pitt who believed race and gender to be identities subsumed under the long, hard human battle over class inequality (see my post “Dairy Queens, Dick Oestreicher and Race” from February ’11).

All semester-long, there had been a three-way tug-of-war between me (and occasionally, my former Pitt grad school colleague who decided to hop across the bridge to Carnegie Mellon to take this course), ten brown-nosing students who’d agree with her despite the evidence (led by Mike and Mark, the “M&M Boys,” as I labeled them for my friends and colleagues) and Goldman. I didn’t expect my now fellow Carnegie Mellon grad students to take my side. But I did expect them to read E.P. Thompson and Sean Wilentz and other folks with a critical eye and not just to get an A out of our professor. There may have been one or two other classes I dreaded more in three years of grad school. Yet I’d never been around a professor more unaware of their own biases than Goldman (see my “Crying Over E.P. Thompson” post from September ’09).

It all came to a head when it was time to discuss David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness (1991) and, indirectly, Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic (1984) on the last Thursday in October ’93, which happened to be my mother’s forty-sixth birthday. Both authors looked at the formation of the White American (and male) working-class in the first half of the nineteenth century. Goldman, as usual, took the stance that the only ideology of significance was one that proclaimed class inequalities the predominant issue explaining the radicalization of the American working-class.

Michelangelo’s sin of Adam and Eve painting, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican City (1508-1512), May 20, 2005. (The Yorck Project via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Finding this a bit laughable (a mistake on my part), I pressed my argument that at least in the case of US history, race and class distinctions have been and remain intertwined. So much so that a typical neo-Marxist analysis of the American working-class couldn’t apply. The next two hours were me and my Pitt colleague against the M&M Boys, the other brown-nosers and Professor Goldman. Luckily in my case, I could not only quote Roediger and Wilentz, but Herbert Gutmann, W.E.B. Du Bois, and a host of other scholars to press home my counterargument. At the end, our professor said to me, in utter exasperation, “I guess we should just go back to original sin.” It meant that I was being a racial determinist, which I guess was supposed to be an insult as well as her version of “No mas, no mas!”

Aside from the fact that America’s “original sin” really was the taking of Native American lands and the systemic destruction of Native American peoples and culture, I really didn’t have much of a response to Goldman’s excited utterance. I finished my argument with a final volley that included Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction (1935) and Roediger, and class adjourned sooner thereafter.

My brown-nosing classmates looked pretty beat from the class session, while me and my colleague from Pitt were both energized from the three-hour class. Still, we couldn’t help but discuss Goldman’s Moment of Surrender at the end of the class. Of course we knew what her “original sin” comment meant when it came to race and slavery. The comment, though, seemed small and petty coming from a professor, one that was too personal, and not professional.

Still, the worst thing I learned is that it took Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness to confirm ideas that Du Bois had begun writing about in 1903 and 1935. That, for me, made me apprehensive about wanting to work with scholars who may well see me and my work as well-intentioned, but inferior to theirs. At the same time, I learned that, for better and for worse, that not going along to get along can be a good thing, especially after years of ridicule from people of all stripes for doing so.

My “original sin” of not going along with whatever Goldman said forced a debate, one of the more exciting times I had in grad school, certainly at Carnegie Mellon. How could that be bad?

Touré’s Post-Blackness ≈ I’ma Be Me?

01 Monday Oct 2012

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Illustration of red wolf with dinner after a hunt, by Sandra Koch, September 29, 2012. (http://nc-es.fws.gov). In public domain.

I know, I know. Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness (2011) has been out for over a year, and I’ve finally, finally managed to read it in the past couple of weeks. I did not want to like this book. I found — and still find — the title to be pretentious and over the top, a perfect fit for Touré’s Twitter and TV persona. Touré values his ideas like they all are new finds of platinum or a form of safe and sustained nuclear fusion. Sometimes Touré can be cutting-edge, but many times, he goes over the edge (as was the case in August on MSNBC with his “niggerization” of Obama comment).

But in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness, Touré puts forward a variety of ideas and insights that I’ll be contemplating in my blogo-neighborhood off and on over the next few months. Touré’s is a very good book. It’s one that is both intellectual and yet revealing about the challenges Blacks face inter- and intraracially in the early twenty-first century.

The premise — once I got past the ridiculous term post-Blackness — is that African Americans and America has advanced just far enough in terms of race for all of our old conceptions of Blackness to have now become meaningless. That Blackness is fully infused in American — maybe even world — culture. That there was never one way to be Black in the first place. Touré himself says, “[t]here is no dogmatically narrow, authentic Blackness because the possibilities for Black identity are infinite. To say something or someone is not Black — or is inauthentically Black — is to sell Blackness short. To limit the potential of Blackness. To be a child of a lesser blackness.” (p. 5).

Litmus paper used in litmus tests, September 29, 2012. (http://chemistry.about.com).

Ironically, though, much of Touré’s book picks apart the notion that the US has become post-racial in the past couple of decades, as best exemplified by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. Of course, Touré uses notions of Blackness and where it has expanded beyond the authenticity litmus test to show that race/racial bias/racism is still alive and well in America. At the same time, Touré shows how post-Blackness has also provided opportunities for millions of Americans White, Black and Brown to reach beyond their own misconceptions of race and themselves, to enrich our lives in politics, scholarship, the arts, not to mention through hip-hop.

One of my main criticisms of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness is that Touré uses a term like post-Blackness (mind you, I hate terms like post-structuralism, post-modernism, and post-racialism too) and doesn’t try in any way to provide a definition that distinguishes it from post-racial. For the purposes of this post, though, the main issue I have revolves around Touré virtually ignoring poor and struggling African Americans in his post-Blackness tour-de-force.

I get it when Touré says that he “never lived a typical Black experience.” (p. 53). At least, I think I do. That despite Touré middle class upbringing, middle-class neighborhood, private school experience, that his is but one representation of Blackness. And that Touré’s experience is as representative of Blackness as my experience of being a Hebrew-Israelite preteen in a working poor family while enrolled in Humanities in Mount Vernon, New York would’ve been thirty years ago (see my post “A Question of My Blackness, Sexuality and Masculinity” from September ’11). Or, for that matter, Wanda Sykes’ comedy special I’ma Be Me (2009) was for her.

That’s great for us, for anyone with enough intellectual power, outsider status, unusual amounts of wisdom, or just plain middle class standing to get the details of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness. But when Touré does bring up the twenty-five percent of Blacks who aren’t part of this post-Blackness elite, he talks at them, and not to them. Yes, I completely agree that Blackness isn’t to be defined in terms of poverty, prison, and projects. No, Blackness shouldn’t be defined by how “down” one is with an impoverished community or how “hard” someone is for beating the shit out of another person (see my “Raised on Hip-Hop?” post from April ’10).

Hakeem Olajuwon posting up Patrick Ewing, 1994 NBA Finals, June 1994. (http://rgj.com).

Still, while I stand with almost one hundred percent of what Touré says in Who Afraid of Post-Blackness in ’12, I don’t think that this book would’ve reached me thirty years ago. The way I would’ve seen it in ’82 or even ’87, a middle class Black guy telling me about how my poverty is insignificant to who I was would’ve been excommunicated from my life for eternity. It wouldn’t have helped me at all deal with the pressures I faced socially, academically and in my family (see my “The Silent Treatment” post from June ’10).

Touré wouldn’t have been able to provide for me a roadmap for how to be me and to ignore the crowd of those in my life — White and Black — who regularly told me that I wasn’t authentically Black or that I was “talkin’ White.” If mild-mannered me at twelve wouldn’t have been reached by Touré’s chapter on Black artists taking Blackness and standing it on its head, I imagine that young African Americans growing up in poverty or struggling with identity issues would find Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness about as easy to embrace as Bill Cosby’s criticism of poor Blacks in ’04.

For me as a writer, the question of how to reach beyond the already converted is always an issue. Touré, as good as he is in his book, merely affirms the path I’ve traveled over the past thirty-one years. He doesn’t really reach those whose path of Blackness has barely begun.

Anthony Cody, Gates Foundation in Ed Reform Debate

13 Thursday Sep 2012

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The below is my response to Irvin Scott and Stacey Childress’ (of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) “Response to Anthony Cody: The Role of the Marketplace in Education.” Given their corporatist, technocratic stance on education reform, I guess I should stop applying for jobs with Gates, since I don’t think they do much in the way of good work in education.

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The use of MLK’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” is self-serving and sanctimonious here at best, along with the idea that charter schools are public schools, as if the two are interchangeable. King’s letter wasn’t just about the growing impatience of African Americans on the long road to equality. It’s also about how to walk the road, the tools necessary to walk the road, as well as the urgency with which we should walk the road. In my dealings with the Gates Foundation over the years as a nonprofit manager for various projects and initiatives, speed has often been more valuable than getting it right. From the first funding of community-based computer labs in libraries (like Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh) to small schools collaborations with nonprofits and NYC DOE, moving from thought to finish was typically at warp factor five or higher. Even program officers I’ve met or known at Gates have admitted over the years that not every multi-million dollar expenditure for small schools, teacher effectiveness, or teacher evaluations has come with plenty of setbacks and mistakes, as well as inconclusive or minimally positive results.

To argue that charter schools are public schools is technically correct, but in practice, hardly so. Charter schools have their own boards, often do not draw their teachers from the same pool as traditional public schools, and many have selection criteria for students. Charter schools — particularly ones with higher levels of success — often have board members with deep pockets or are able to raise funds through those kinds of connections. They may have by-laws that enable them to hire non-union teachers, non-traditional teachers, even college instructors, in ways that traditional public schools simply cannot. And though the selection criteria for students varies from one charter school to the next, traditional public schools don’t have that option.

Yes, we need a twenty-first century education system in the US. But we’re not going to get there with more high-stakes standardized testing, with curriculum and teacher evaluations that are tied to test scores, with the funding of every half-baked idea that has its roots in the twentieth century. Real reform requires more than smart people entrusted with a portfolio of $5 or $10 million. It comes with real cooperation with educators, a commitment to engage parents, a curriculum that is about education beyond a test, a full-fledged effort at human development, not just job training. One thing that would be a place to start would be to focus on K-16 education, instead of separating the K-12 and post-secondary spheres, you know, to break free of our twentieth-century thinking about American education.

Irvin Scott and Stacey Childress should know all of this already. If they do not, shame on them for not doing the research and outreach that is a necessary part of grantmaking. However, since they do, it seems to me they need to do less defending of the Gates Foundation’s record and more work and real collaboration to move forward. “We don’t need no education” reform, so long as it continues to come out of elite money and thinking that dictates to the rest of us what reform will look like.

School of Dreams (and Nightmares)

10 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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School of Dreams (2003), by Edward Humes, September 9, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Yesterday was the thirty-first anniversary of my first day of seventh grade at A.B. Davis Middle School, my first day in a six-year slog in Mount Vernon public schools’ Humanities Program. The academic pressures that came with being part of a gifted-talented track magnet program were such that the lessons I learned during those years remain with me to this day. The unique lessons about who I was and whom I wanted and needed to become, though, are the kinds of lessons reserved for a memoir, like, say, Boy @ The Window.

But there are other lessons, other issues that anyone who has gone through such a program, is in one, or has kids in one, should heed. Perhaps the best book I’ve ever read about the experiences of high ability students in a gifted track middle or high school has been Edward Humes’ School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School (2003). Despite some of the flaws in the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author’s account covering a year in the life of Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, this is a book I’d use in many of my future graduate seminars in US educational history.

A particularly poignant passage was where Humes wrote, the “combination of a school built upon high expectations and a student population whose dominant culture elevates learning to a high priority—and hard work in school to an absolute necessity—makes for a kind of education echo chamber” (p. 340). Humes meant this as a positive comment on the academic culture of a public high school in Southern California.  But it also reflected a constant tension between learning and zero-sum competition.

Starbucks double chocolate chip frappucino, September 10, 2012. (htttp://wwwcoffeespitfire.blogspot.com).

Humes somehow doesn’t fully take stock of this tension beyond the context of the high school in which he embedded himself in 2000-01. There were stories, disheartening stories about seventh graders hitting up Starbucks for coffee before school, during lunch and after school to stay awake. Of parents who shunned their kids’ artistic talent and aspirations in their quest to ensure they earned a degree in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) field. Of students taking as many as six AP (Advanced Placement) courses in a single school year, or colluding to cheat on a calculus or physics exam when the pace of study and testing proved to be too much.

Yes, despite this, Whitney has produced thousands of elite college-goers, and 4.0 is the standard, not the exception, that its students shoot for. But now, in an age in which high-stakes testing is the norm, what’s the social and psychological message that we’re communicating to the current crop of K-12 students in the US today?

For me, the best way to answer this question is to look back on my own experience and the experiences of my former Humanities classmates. Based on my own writings and findings, there’s plenty of evidence that intensive academic rigor and competition — like intensive athletic training and competition — will produce excellent students well prepared for college, but not necessarily well prepared for life. Many of my former Humanities classmates (and many of the students Humes tracked and interviewed for School of Dreams) were socially inept, put themselves under constant stress (not to mention experiencing psychological pressures from each other, their parents and teachers) and lacked the deeper critical reasoning skills necessary to make college a worthwhile experience.

The students had a “cram-and-exam” methodology to learning, spending hours learning techniques and concepts and little time in applying them beyond the classroom in the vast majority of their subjects. Often when students discovered a new talent, particularly in writing, the arts or in music, many of their parents pounced into action to admonish teachers for encouraging these developments or to force their kids into their way of thinking about their future. Bottom line: while many of these high-achievers were willing to slit each others’ throats for an A, an AP “5” or an SAT 1600, they hadn’t really made up their minds about who they wanted to be, the talents they wanted to explore, or the world in which they wanted to live.

“Nightmares & Daydreams” episode screen shot, Avatar: The Last Airbender, September 10, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws due to pic’s low resolution.

When I first read Humes’ School of Dreams nine years ago, it forced me to think about these parallels. I realized that if Starbucks was within a mile of either A.B. Davis Middle or Mount Vernon High School in the ’80s, our class alone would’ve spent about $160,000 a year there on coffee and pastries. That most of us were sane enough to only take three or four AP courses my senior year. That our standard for a minimally acceptable SAT score was a 1200. That, instead of kids crying or running away from home for two days over a B, attempted suicides or a turn to crystal meth would’ve been more common. I guess by Whitney’s standards, we would’ve been slackers.

Still, more than a quarter-century since my last Humanities course, with tighter budgets and far more high-stakes testing (see the correlation?), the crush of intense academic competition has made our public schools a poor place for polishing students into well-adjusted young adults. Yes, I know that this is primarily a parent’s responsibility. But then again, public schools are meant to be far more than an octagon ring with No. 2 pencils.

My Friend Matt

07 Friday Sep 2012

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Beavis and Butt-head titlecard, May 21, 2012. (Nerd 101 via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws due to image’s low resolution.

Over the past couple of years, one of my son’s favorite bedtime stories has been about a character I named Matt (see my post “Crush #1 and Other Bedtime Stories” from July ’10). Having a friend with superhuman farts or a friend who belts out ’80s pop tunes while beating up some of the other characters isn’t exactly based on my growing up experience. In the case of Matt, his character was one that always over-explained things — like why 2+2=4 — and wanted to play Canasta in the middle of a basketball game.

Buried in all the ridiculousness and hyperbole around the character was a real-life friend named Matt, whom I met twenty years ago this month. Matt was in my African American History graduate seminar at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall of ’92. I took the course on the advice of my eventual advisor Joe Trotter, whom I had met that spring at my first academic conference at Lincoln University (see my “Meeting Joe Trotter” post from May ’12). I decided to take the course because my history grad program at Pitt didn’t have anything close to a course on Black historiography. In fact, I couldn’t find a course that would even approximate a graduate seminar in African American studies at the University of Pittsburgh in ’92.

I was one of seven students in the course, with two women (one of whom was Black and in her thirties) and three young White males, though not as young as twenty-two year-old me. And there was Matt, the first Black male I’d seen in either my own or Carnegie Mellon’s History PhD who wasn’t me. What I noticed immediately was the fact that in our Tuesday 9:30-12:30 course, Matt was the only one who spent the first two hours leafing through the one or two books and five articles we were to read every single week. Leafing, because as it turned out, Matt had already finished all of his coursework for the doctorate. He was auditing the course, and rarely read anything for the seminar in advance.

Carnegie Mellon University logo, June 27, 2012. (Abrio via Wikipedia). In public domain.

That’s what I learned when we had our first lunch together in the cafeteria of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where I could get a cheap lunch before or after shooting hoops. It was then that I also noticed something peculiar about Matt. He chewed his food with his mouth half-open, where if I looked too closely, I’d notice the mix of saliva, wild rice, green beans and chicken breast being crushed by his raptor-like teeth. I never knew anyone over twelve, much less someone approaching forty, who didn’t know how to chew with their mouth closed until I’d met Matt.

Despite my observation of some weird tendencies, I found my first conversations with Matt to be exhilarating. I simply hadn’t been around anyone in my graduate school experience aside from a professor or two who was as knowledgeable about American and African American history, politics and culture as Matt. That, and the fact that he had worked in the community development corporation world as a community organizer made him an atypical graduate student, even compared to the other older perpetual-student-graduates I’d known over the previous five years.

I learned from our eatery outings — especially after the first Boston Market in Pittsburgh opened in Squirrel Hill in mid-September — that Matt was the younger son of two prominent Black/Afro-Caribbean parents, both of whom were in the social work field, both of whom had doctorates, both of whom were prominent on Pitt’s campus. His father, of course, was also an ordained minister. I could only imagine the kind of pressure that would’ve put on Matt over the years to do something meaningful with his life.

Canasta, May 31, 2007. (Roland Scheicher via Wikipedia). Released to public domain by author.

The one political argument that Matt made during the fall presidential election cycle in ’92 was the need for serious campaign finance reform. Remember, this was a good four years before McCain-Feingold, which has since of course been shredded by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Aside from that, most of what we agreed on were issues of interpretation in African American historiography and the fact that two of our classmates, Mark and Mike, were the ultimate brown-nosers. They kissed butt at times like their lives depended on it, leading to heated arguments in our seminar every week. The fact that they thought Fogel and Engelmann’s Time on the Cross (1974) was a great work on slavery said it all on these future neo-cons.

Still, while I found Matt’s contrarian Beavis and Butt-head view of the world interesting at times, I also realized that Matt spent an amazing amount of time talking. At Hillman Library, in front of William Pitt Union, in the halls of Baker Hall, at Boston Market. And as I’d learn later on, there was a great distance between Matt’s interesting and sometimes great ideas and the hard work needed to put them on paper for a committee or to put them in action in his own life.

Grading and the 21st Century Professor

03 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race, Work

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Between a rock and a hard place, The Simpsons (movie), September 2, 2012. (http://clubsnap.com). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws –  low resolution.

The Chronicle of Higher Education and other prominent periodicals have been talking about the precarious rise of grade inflation for more than two decades now. Article after article and story after story has shown professors at elite and public institutions lowering their standards and bending into advanced yoga positions to give students higher grades than they’ve earned. All to ensure a minimum of contention over grades and maximum scores in student evaluations of their courses.

But what of the many professors who don’t want to lower their standards but so far, who can’t ignore a student’s lack of attendance or participation, their late assignments or attempts at plagiarism? For those college instructors, they can expect more grief and stupid ass excuses from students, not to mention lower evaluation scores.

Sigmund Freud hanging by one hand by David Cerney (1997), Prague, September 2, 2012. (http://swick.co.uk/). Qualifies as fair use – pic has low resolution.

For tenured professors, particularly those at research universities, this doesn’t matter at all. For some tenure-track professors, instructors at teaching-focused liberal arts colleges, and the army of adjuncts that are the majority of instructors at the college level, this could mean the difference between steady employment and homelessness. It’s a sad situation when folks aren’t secure enough in their jobs to actually do the most difficult parts of their jobs, to evaluate a student’s performance accurately and to confront students whenever they violate an academic code of conduct.

It was part of the deal that I made with myself when I began teaching my own sections and then course as a graduate student twenty years ago at the University of Pittsburgh. To be fair and flexible, to be tough when necessary, but to be compassionate when the circumstances called for it. For the vast majority of the 2,000 or so high school, undergraduate and graduate students I’ve taught since ’92, that has been a workable philosophy. It’s even gotten me the occasional praise and recognition for being a very good professor.

Of course, I faced the occasional student who complained to me about their grade. Most of those students were C students looking for a C+ or a B, or a B+/A- student hoping for an A. Really, prior to my current faculty position, I had only had three complaints of any major consequence. One was from a student who managed to never show up for my US History to 1877 sections the spring semester of ’93, who failed the final exam so badly that I let him get away with his attempts at cheating — his cheat notes were that bad!

The other two came from two students in my History of American Education graduate course in the summer of ’98 at Duquesne University. One thought that someone as young (and as Black) as me could give her a grade lower than an A, while another harassed me with emails for a month because her A- in my course ruined her 4.0 average. Though an adjunct, I stood my ground, knowing that I had the support of my department chair.

Since starting my current teaching position in January ’08, I’ve faced a couple of dozen situations in which students have complained about their grades. I think I’ve only taught three courses out of about twenty in the past four years in which I haven’t fielded any complaints from students about their grades.

Most of these complaints have been really ones about me not accepting every cockamamie excuse for a late assignment or plagiarism. Excuses like their Internet or their access to the university’s online classroom platform being down. Or not knowing that cutting and pasting ten pages’ worth of other people’s words for a ten-page history research paper was in fact blatant plagiarism. Or that their jobs, last-minute deployments (which were hardly last-minute), children (who in many cases were teenagers), three car accidents in two weeks or other life challenges managed to get in the way of them submitting multiple assignments on time, even with extensions. But somehow, when I’ve held these students accountable and assigned an appropriate grade, I’m the bad guy.

That the students I teach these days are technically adult learners (I say “technically” because they don’t act like adults when they complain about their grading) actually makes this matter worse. Whether in the military, married with children, or working a full-time job, these students in their twenties, thirties and older tend to complain, beg, threaten me and then beg again. It’s exhausting to constantly have to persuade students to read my syllabus in order to make them understand that the rules and rubrics I’ve laid out are the reasons for their F, D, C or B.

But no matter the vitriol I provoke from assigning a grade, I also have to be careful in my language, emotions and tone. That is the reality that is teaching in many higher education institutions today. It is unfortunate, for there are many students who don’t understand that being a student requires being a responsible and ethical adult. Whether seventeen or seventy, whining, complaining and threatening your professor for a higher grade is completely unacceptable, and deserves at least a little sarcasm in response.

Crooked Fingers

31 Friday Aug 2012

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My crooked left fingers, August 31, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

It’s been a bit more than thirty years since I’ve had surgery on two left fingers in an attempt to straighten them. These fingers are symbolic of what happens when a family slides off a cliff in the Himalayas into deep poverty, of when a nation doesn’t have an adequate social safety net or adequate healthcare for the poor.

At the very end of my glorious summer of ’82, I needed surgery on the ring and pinky fingers of my left hand to remove two benign tumors. The tumors had apparently been there since I was eight and had caused the two fingers to grow crookedly, to the point where I couldn’t use them. After the hospital strike (see my “The Quest For Work, Past and Present” post from earlier this month) and my ordeal with Maurice had ended (see my post “Boy, Interrupted” from July ’12), my mother realized that I needed to see a doctor, and within a week I was at Mount Vernon Hospital in surgery.

They removed the tumors, straightened my fingers, stitched them up and put them in a cast. If all went well, after a month, they’d remove the cast and the stitching. That, and a few checkups to check the progress and scar tissue buildup on my fingers, and I should’ve been good to go. But that happy ending wasn’t to be. After the casts came off in early September, I didn’t see a doctor again until April ’85.

Why? My mother had been downgraded to part-time status at Mount Vernon Hospital by October ’82, and after the birth of my sister Sarai in February ’83, could not work and take care of five kids at the same time. We went on welfare in April ’83, and with that, received Medicaid services. Those services, as anyone who has spent any serious time in America’s worst poverty should already know, are limited in scope, and don’t exactly cover the removal of post-surgery scar tissue.

Choppers and Westchester County Medical Center, Valhalla, NY, August 31, 2012. (http://nymc.edu)

So, a year or so after my tumor removal/finger-straightening surgery, my left ring and pinky fingers went crooked again. By the time me and my mother had schlepped on the old Bee-Line Route 41 bus to Westchester County Medical Center in Valhalla in ’85, my fingers were about half as crooked as they had been before surgery in August ’82. The doctor, of course, misdiagnosed my fingers as having keloids, and offered steroids to shrink them down. Injections, by the way, not covered under Medicaid at the time.

But that wasn’t the only problem. My crooked fingers itched a lot, and made it difficult for me to make one-handed grabs in football tryouts in ’84, not to mention wearing a baseball glove for baseball tryouts in ’86. Some girls at Mount Vernon High School grilled me with questions whenever they noticed them, as if I was a Yeti who decided to visit Western civilization for the first time. One of them told me point-blank, “I can’t go with you — your fingers are too ugly.” A young woman said something to the same effect to me my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh.

It wasn’t until the fall of ’02 that I finally saw a specialist at Johns Hopkins about my finger, one who confirmed the initial diagnosis of tumors from ’82. Between two doctors and a physical therapist, I gained about two-thirds of my total range of motion in my ring finger, but only five degrees’ worth of motion in my left pinky by the time my son was born in July ’03.

I got to the point where I could finally palm a basketball in my left hand. But ultimately, that was all I could do. It turned out that I’d have to lose a joint in my crooked fingers — to have them fused — in order to straighten them. Otherwise, there was nothing wrong with the bones. It made more sense to leave them crooked.

Maybe this is good thing, though. That no matter my past, present or future successes, that I have them as a reminder of how far I’ve come. They also serve to remind me how many others suffer in the US because of poverty.